Learning to cook a better Chicken Rice
Excuse my musings about food.
It all started with a visit to a famous hawker centre a few weeks ago. My new MRT (subway, underground) line just by my flat, made it very convenient to get there. Don’t get me wrong, the popular chicken rice at the hawker centre was lovely. I just couldn’t understand why there was this gooey brown sauce laced over the meat and I wondered if I had missed a step in the evolution of chicken rice back in Singapore.
When you live overseas, like I do, you can sometimes miss out on the food trends happening back where you grew up. It explains why I frequently return home - to visit friends and family, and to keep abreast of what is going on with local food.
I posted an Instagram story asking if anyone could explain this new sauce to me. There was a theory that it was one way to add some oyster sauce flavour, and that this practice was more synonymous with this particular brand of chicken rice and less everywhere else.
A few days later, I caught up with my two friends, Khim and Jo. They are Hainanese and are proud of the culinary role that the Hainanese immigrant group has played in the course of Singapore’s history. The Hainanese are most known for their chicken rice, but their legacy is much larger. They created the kind of localised Western food derived from their former experiences working in British colonial households, social clubs, army barracks and even Russian merchant ships. Hence, we can thank them for Hainanese pork chops, local style shashlik and borscht among others. The Raffles Hotel bartender who concocted the Singapore Sling is Hainanese. The coffee shops that serve Kaya egg jam toast or chicken curry, are often Hainanese-owned and operated.
After lunch, the three of us were joined by Pearlyn Lee who had opened The Hood in Paris, bringing all our lovely local food favourites to the City of Lights, and hosting guest chefs from our Lion City, including Damian D’Silva (a Masterchef Singapore judge) and the late Jeffrey Chia of Nonya Bong, a private dining establishment. Pearlyn is on a quest to “put Chicken Rice on the Michelin Guide” in France.
Without any deliberate plan, we started talking about chicken rice. Khim and Jo shared how their family would prepare this dish at home:
Coat the rice grains and infuse the chilli sauce with the prized chicken fat.
Of course! Scrub the chicken with salt to get rid of all impurities.
Cook the rice with pandan leaves.
Stuff the bird with ginger and spring onions.
Plunge the poached chicken in an ice bath to achieve the “jelly” skin texture.
Drizzle the meat with light soy sauce and sesame oil. The residue pool of sauce is delicious.
Khim’s mother only garnishes the plate with cucumber, no tomatoes.
The broth soup is clear, with perhaps some slim shreds of cabbage.
Use a thicker consistency of dark soy sauce for dipping.
With all these tips in my head, I boarded my flight to New York. Lo and behold, the plane aired an episode of “Food Feud” (a local Singapore TV series) featuring Swee Kee, the legendary chicken rice shop on Middle Road that no longer exists.
As my older sisters would say, Swee Kee was pretty much “before my time” with its heydays in the 1950s and 60s. To this day, the benchmark for good chicken rice in Singapore would be Swee Kee for the older generation, and Chatterbox. The latter has revamped itself and remains a pricey option that deviates from the affordable hawker offering found in almost every street corner of Singapore. Chatterbox’s chicken rice is plush, plated meaty tender chicken with a side of glossy rice and accompanied with bowls for the individual sauces. Nonetheless, fussy regulars will tell you that the new rendition of chicken rice at the refurbished Chatterbox is no longer like the one from before.
The TV episode featured four chicken rice outlets which claimed some connection to Swee Kee, starting with a name that riffed off it. These included Sing Swee Kee, Zheng Swee Kee and Rui Ji. The general consensus was that none of these mirrored the original Swee Kee. The takeaway for me was what some of those interviewed remembered about Swee Kee - fragrant rice, poached chickens that lay on a tray to air cool, and the silky and tender texture of the meat.
Luckily for me, I had what was supposedly Swee Kee’s chicken rice recipe, found in a vintage cookbook in my late mother’s collection. The recipe was simplistic and stated adding oyster sauce and a chicken cube to the chicken stock for making the soup. The all-important chilli sauce comprised of red chilies, garlic, ginger, chicken stock and a few drops of white vinegar.
Upon my return to New York, determined once again to resuscitate this discussion about chicken rice, I posted on social media to solicit more feedback.
Chicken Rice fans told me a few things which I applied to my latest tweak to how I prepared my chicken rice last night:
- “Tender poached chicken”, “Jelly makes it special”. I achieved this after dunking the poached chicken in an ice bath for 5 minutes to cool down and settle the skin fat.
- Beforehand, I had scrubbed the chicken in and out with coarse salt. I then set the chicken aside for an hour, as stated in the Swee Kee recipe, before simmering for 40 to 50 minutes.
- Grainy rice, “oily and separate”, “well flavoured with chicken stock”. I coated the rice grains with chicken fat which I had rendered for about 15 minutes, and cooked the rice with chicken stock, along with a tied bunch of aromatic pandan leaves. Instead of my usual rice cooker, I cooked the rice in a pot so that I could monitor the grains and avoid clumps (which can happen in a rice cooker). I treated this cooking method as if I was cooking risotto, adding more stock as the grains absorbed the liquid and holding back if the rice looked almost cooked. I also let the rice finish off with some steaming from the residual heat, with the pot covered and the heat off.
- I used Jo’s family recipe to make the chilli garlic sauce, adding a small dose of chicken fat, a squeeze of calamansi lime and some fiery chilli padi because the sauce “has to have heat and be tangy”. If calamansi lime is hard to find, I think white vinegar, which was in the Swee Kee recipe, will be just fine.
- The dish should be offered with “a dollop of grated ginger”. I did not grate my ginger. Instead, I retrieved the ginger that had been stuffed in the cavity and blended that in a small processor.
- I left out tomatoes and just garnished with sliced cucumber, some spring onions and cilantro. Adding back tomatoes is okay, for a more personal preference.
Like in the past, I continued to cook the chicken in a pot taller than it is wide to fully submerge the bird.
These later tweaks did improve my dish. I sensed a more gelatinous texture to the skin and I appreciated the nuanced graininess and flavour of my rice. My husband quipped that it was the “best rice” I had ever cooked for this dish.
This whole process was fulfilling. Through it all, I learnt that the best improvements to a beloved dish come from just chatting with others and then summarising all the great pointers they share.
Making me hungry! 🐓
So interesting, Sharon! I feel much better informed now.